buzz forums

As we all know Buzz comes with a selection of audio drivers. In my experience on windows 7 Wasapi works great without any additional fiddling and it's low latency. When I was on windows xp I believe I was using DirectX which sounded all right to me.

However, After getting the Polac suite, and being recommended to try polac asio in order to get buzz running at 192khz, I finally started exploring the different audio drivers available and my eyes have been opened.

I wasn't conscious of how dirty a sound Wasapi gives. Everything seems to be overlaid with a crusty digital fuzz. One reason I could never hear it before was because I was always working at pretty low amplitudes. Right now I'm trying to build a professional live sound and as I crank the volume on my amp lots of new things (good and bad) are popping out.

Everyone loves ASIO but unfortunately I'm not able to use it in buzz. I also work with Guitar Rig, and it wants to use ASIO and it doesn't want to share, but after some experimentation I found that WDM Kernel Streaming gives me a very clean sound.

Now I don't know what WDM Kernel Streaming is but I must say it sounds kickin rad. Which brings me to my question, namely what the heck do all these settings do!?

We have Buffers, Sample Rate, Bits and Buffer Size.

I know what sample rate is, essentially the resolution of the sound, and I believe bit depth has to do with how many levels of amplitude can be represented in a sound. These other buffers and the size of the buffers are not obvious to me.

I know that the buffer size increases the latency, and to my ears, increasing the number of buffers seemed to fatten and thicken the sound. With only 2 buffers it sounded thin to me, but I want to know what these things do.

Also every time I set the buffers to a higher number, it resets itself to 4, so that's some information for Polac to know.

What drivers do you prefer? What are your experiences with them? Now any cool facts or tips and tricks?

you say you can't use ASIO because guitar rig blocks it, but why don't you just load guitar rig as a VST inside buzz and direct the input (with polac audio input machines) to guitar rig vst.

also: in theory (and practice really) ALL sound drivers should sound exactly the same (at the same bitrate and samplerate). ASIO shouldn't sound better than WASAPI or WDM or whatever, if it does then something is wrong with your drivers or windows audio settings (some onboard realtek crap i tried had this resampling problem where when it was at 48khz in windows it all sounded distorted as hell, went away when switching to 44.1khz).

buffer size has absolutely NO influence on sound (unless you go way too low and it starts to distort, but thats because your system can't handle it and you get dropouts, not because smaller buffersizes sound different). A typical machine should be able to handle around 10ms buffer size easily without dropouts. Buffer size affects ONLY the latency of the sound. Ask yourself this: does the music sound different if it arrives at 11:00pm than when it arrives at 11:01pm ? obviously no

as for drivers, just go with ASIO, its what every professional uses.

Thanks for the advice! I hadn't really considered that as an option. I'm still learning the Polac suite, and didn't know about polac audio in. Using WDM kernel streaming did feel a bit like a janky workaround, so I'll see if I can get guitar rig working as a vst in buzz.

As to the rest of the stuff you said I hear ya! And I dont' doubt that what you're saying is true, but on my system there is a totally noticeable fuzz effect over everything when I'm using the wasapi driver. As I said it's not really apparent at lower amplitudes, but at high amplitudes it's very apparent. I admit I couldn't hear any difference between any of the other drivers though, which is good because I guess there isn't any!

I'm not surprised to hear there isn't any effect on sound when you increase the buffer size, I didn't hear any. Is buffer size synonymous with latency?

I was able to hear a difference when I lowered the number of buffers to 2, and I felt that I could hear a difference when increased the number of buffers to maximum, but it probably was my imagination given what you've said here. When trying to engineer sound we often are manipulating things that are at the edges of our perception, and in that space our dispositions and opinions have enough effect to make us hear things that aren't even there I believe!

This is an old conversation but I wanted to bump it because I had a thought.

"you say you can't use ASIO because guitar rig blocks it, but why don't you just load guitar rig as a VST inside buzz and direct the input (with polac audio input machines) to guitar rig vst."

Because if I use the two applications separately I'm more likely to make better use of all my cores, and not overburden buzz, which is really quite finicky in my experience.

onecircles wrote:I was able to hear a difference when I lowered the number of buffers to 2, and I felt that I could hear a difference when increased the number of buffers to maximum, but it probably was my imagination given what you've said here. When trying to engineer sound we often are manipulating things that are at the edges of our perception, and in that space our dispositions and opinions have enough effect to make us hear things that aren't even there I believe!

Yep, and it's why audio cable manufactures appear to get away with selling £100,000 speaker wire - http://www.amazon.co.uk/AudioQuest-Sign ... 00DBY5WK0/

But free UK delivery

Totally insane!

onecircles wrote:Because if I use the two applications separately I'm more likely to make better use of all my cores, and not overburden buzz, which is really quite finicky in my experience.

You can run the VST as a separate process. Right click -> Preferences... -> Third tab (it will be the name of your VST) -> Run in separate process

Woah, rad. Thank you.